


My Moirail Subcontracted My Pale Quad And I’m Surprisingly Okay With It.

by RainofLittleFishes



Series: Beforus Club Sandwich [2]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Beforus, Cuddling & Snuggling, Gill!Kat is mollified, Gills, Grubs, Humor, Nookworms, Parenting according to Karkat, Pervy Inclade Fanciers, Pressure, Restraints, Slice of Life According to Karkat, Threesome, cross-quadrant shenanigans, kink checklist
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-16
Updated: 2014-11-16
Packaged: 2018-02-25 16:24:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,169
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2628254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RainofLittleFishes/pseuds/RainofLittleFishes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The continued saga and likely conclusion of  our glimpse into Life-According-to-Beforus-Karkat. Porn. Parenting, etc., etc., etc. </p><p>In Which:<br/>Terezi subcontracts out her duties as Karkat’s moirail, Karkat objects, and Nepeta convinces him to try it anyway. (She totally paps that ass.) </p><p>Karkat and Sollux discuss co-parenting in an entirely rational manner in which no one actually gets smacked, no matter how much they were asking for it. </p><p>Karkat plays with three tiny gross troll spawn and contemplates the Empire. </p><p>Nepeta is the wingless-fairy-ninja of kinky ‘rails with pails, and Aradia likewise proves to be a pervy inclade fancier, but actually has wings.</p><p>Karkat finds himself surprisingly okay with life, the universe, and everything.</p>
            </blockquote>





	My Moirail Subcontracted My Pale Quad And I’m Surprisingly Okay With It.

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ThePioden](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThePioden/gifts).



“What the fucknuts?!” You’re pretty sure that you said this aloud, but not entirely. Nepeta is still staring at you with that polite pleasant expression on her face, as if she didn’t just cut you out of a room full of socialites and politicians like a howlbeast pretending to be a working barkbeast herding truculent woolbeasts in order to corner you (the prey) in a cleaning drone closet and _proposition you between the refill tanks. **WTF**_ **.**

“No. No! Absolutely not. I don’t believe you and will magnanimously allow you the next ten seconds to retract your earlier espousal of stupidity and substitute some polite nothing or abscond. Since I know you only need one of those seconds, I’m granting you an extra nine, like the lives of your crazy jungle lusus.”

“You heard me the first time, Karkitten.” Now she’s smiling, gently, more honest than the previous expression, but not in the least helpful, as she is headed entirely in the wrong direction, that is, still not leaving or retracting her crazy.

“I have a purroper contract with Terezi!” This is a sun-bright and equally final smiling pronouncement and she pulls a piece of paper from her cleavage. At least it isn’t a blade. If Nepeta wanted you dead you’d already have arrived at your next destination.

“No.” It is a sad little parry and it scurries off to hide itself in a hole.

“Read it yourself!”

She shoves it in your face and you catch a glimpse of “I, Terezi Pyrope, do hereby bequeath custody of my moirail, one Karkat Vantas, to Nepeta Leijon for purposes of physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual maintenance for the period of time between my departure…” You explode again and push it away.

“Terezi’s signature is easy to fake, it’s just a giant red X. I’m not buying what you’re selling.”

“Check for yourself.” She shrugs, hands you the contract, and pulls out her palmtop to play a brief snatch of Terezi reading the same contract and the two of them signing. Recorded Terezi looks you in the eye, or thereabouts, and tells you “Be good. Record anything of particular interest or utility in blackmail. If you make more grubs, I want a candy red with wings.” Recorded Terezi licks the screen, and it might as well be the hammer of justice falling.

“I didn’t sign this! I’m not some senile lusus to be traded into the custody of some distant inclade-of-inclade when their backwater wriggler goes to the fleet! And what would Equius think?”

Equius is a boring stick-in-the-sludgy-suspended-dirt-medium, but he almost achieves the status of interesting just by having someone as vibrantly intriguing and dangerous as Nepeta as his moirail. You don’t want to come between them. She’s clearly the best thing that has ever happened to the stuffy engineer. Getting Sollux for his red quad just kind of doomed him to never emerge from the indoors. They are such codependent enablers and you really should check in on Horuss when you pick up Mituna todusk. You wonder if the tiny blue has ever reached fresh air outside your management. Nepeta has probably seen to it, right? Oh wait, she’s talking, you should really pay attention…

“…so you just leave my moirail to me, no worries. He likes you.”

“He had me fooled.”

“He also likes a certain decorum and you confuse him. It’s not disappurrroval. He’s very grateful for Horuss. I am too! And Mituna is soooo cute! He’ll be grateful for Mituna too, once he’s potty trained at least.”

“I didn’t agree.”

“You’re not actually yelling anymore, it’s almost the same thing.”

You open your mouth, but you can’t think of anything but “no”, and there’s a part of you that really, really wants a good papping.

“It’s not a full moirallegiance. We’ve got free rein on the talking and papping, but Terezi put in some limits.”

“Like what.” You shouldn’t engage her further in this absurdity, but your ashen leaves drag you to the bucket on their own terms all the time. Why should you worry about propriety now?

“No licking.”

You roll your eyes.

“But that’s okay, I purrfer to _nibble_. And she didn’t say anything about kissing!”

You flex your claws and look away. You know you get stressed out a lot, but you didn’t think Terezi was _this_ annoyed with you. She’s usually the one talking you down. When she needs talking down, if she thinks you’d disapprove, she usually makes sure she’s done whatever she intends to before she lets you find out.

You’re not sure why she stays. You’re not sure what she gets out of it, out of you, when she mostly ignores you when you advise her, but until now, you thought this was working. A bit dysfunctional, but not broken.

It feels like she’s trying out probationary replacements, like that’s the most efficient way to manage the transition. It makes you feel like a wreck even though five minutes ago you were fine. Five minutes ago you were blissfully unaware of the chasm in your moirallegiance, making plans to abscond from the socializing early for a quiet night of reading with Kankri.

“You can still talk to her, Karkat! But you have a really stressful job and I’m physically closer and now you have a another person to pile with when you need it to-“

“Keep your glutes papped,” rasps out the less than reassuring voice of your moirail from Nepeta’s palmtop. Of course she’s listening in.

“You never pap anything but my glutes. What kind of moirail are you anyways?” You snap this out as if everything is the same as usual but you know you don’t mean it as much as you would have five minutes ago. The bigger question is, what kind of moirail _are you_?

“A legislacerator. Don’t cry surprised now, cuddlebug. Nepeta thinks you’re cute, so she’s going to keep your rump warm for me while I’m away.” You shake yourself out of your idiocy. Terezi is hardly afraid of honesty, though slyness may sometimes be her ally. She really is just looking out for you.

“Terezi, how many times do I have to tell you, I don’t need my butt papped. My butt is perfectly fine. My butt has never been less then fine,” and you’d continue to explain that it isn’t your butt that needs calming, it’s your head, because you’re continually flummoxed by new levels of WTF which trolls, especially the ones in your quadrants, inclade, and chain of command continue to reach, and this is not a new problem, you’ve been grappling with it since the sweeply roundup divested you of your lusus at four sweeps and deposited you in state care and therefore Terezi’s tender mercies…but Nepeta is touching your butt and you can’t quite pick off where you left off.

You can feel your mouth opening and closing, possibly an eyebrow shifts. Your butt fails to register the complaint and strong hands are now spanning the arches of your hips, thumbs and fingers and palms, the indent of claws are dimpling your skin with none of the terrible pressure that could gut you before you noticed.

Nepeta is not the strongest troll in the Beforan Empire. She’s probably not the fastest, or the sneakiest. But she is probably the deadliest combination of the three. You may, possibly find her devastatingly attractive, but no one can prove it.

She shifts her hands just a little higher, to your waist and the indent of the curve of your spine, presses for a moment. You sway toward her just a little, she presses again, a ripple of her strong fingers, and you can hear and feel a little crackle-pop. Suddenly your back feels ten times better and you have to find your spine again to avoid swaying closer to her.

“Mmrr, it really is a spectacular butt,” Nepeta comments, and she lets go.

She really has wonderful hands.

You catch yourself on the wall between the tank of fibrous plant shiner and the tank of stone solvent. You have a brief terrible thought of being caught here by a cleaning drone backing up, stabbed to death by a drone siphon. Would they notice if they waxed the floors red?

“Well?” asks the voice of the devil, currently incarnated as your sharp-as-a-bag-of-knives-and-pudding moirail, five perigees away at full helmspeed.

“Grk,” you manage. Not helpful. “What do you want?!” You’re not sure who you’re addressing at this point.

“I’d purrfer that you say yes, but no is acceptable too. We just want you to be happy.”

“Speak for yourself, Lioness, I want Karkat to not be dead.”

“That too of course.” And she frowns as if she’s contemplating returning the favor to anyone who wanted you dead. It’s surprisingly tempting.

“And I really want a candy-red grub with wings. See if you can point him at someone with wings.”

“That too of course!!” This is back to her happy and entirely too considering smile, and you need to interrupt right there.

“I’m not pailing Tavros.”

Nepeta cocks her head. “Why not? Don’t you like him?”

“I like a lot of people, for a given value of ‘like’. That doesn’t mean I have to pail them.” She spends way too long looking at you contemplatively.

“How about piling them instead?”

She reaches for your face and you think about a lot, but at the moment you don’t think of all the ways she could kill you with just that reaching hand, thumb in the socket, broken nose, through the eardrum, snapped neck. Her hand hovers, the pad of her thumb over the arch of your cheekbone.

“How about piling me?” her voice is husky and a little wistful, and that’s what does it, the hook in your sad little warmblood bloodpusher, pulling your sad runty gilled frame to her, that she sounds like she needs you. You are capable of a great deal of “NO”, usually with much more articulation than you’ve managed tonight, but you’re not great at “no” when someone needs you.

You reach back, your thumb hovering over her own cheek, until you let it rest, fingers curving to follow the sturdy beautiful arch of her skull.

“I have rules,” you start, but have to gather your scattered bits to remember them. “This stops if I say so.”

“Of course!”

“I need a proper pile, not the closest closet. Some of us don’t find it titillating to do it among the cleaning supplies while waiting for a drone to back up over them.”

“Of horse!”

“And I demand backrubs.” You really are a pale slut.

A cackling issues from the palmtop. “Witnessed and sealed. You may now pap the posterior.”

*

You wake up feeling ten times better than you ought to feel, no longer feeling betrayed that your moirail thinks you can’t cope, ready to listen and reply and prod as necessary to help her when she needs it. Your services to your moirail have always favored the intellectual over the corporeal and she’s a good enough moirail to recognize that that isn’t enough for you. (Really, she’d have to be pretty stupid not to, and the only trolls who mistake Terezi for stupid are the ones rapidly falling into some sort of trap. They totally deserve it.) You still plan to make her work for it if she ever tries to make you admit that this was a not entirely terrible idea.

Your throat is sore from talking and your back feels better than it has in ages. You wake up in your own recuperacoon, with no memory of reaching it, just the sensation of a cozy pile and Nepeta’s strong body along yours. You wake up smiling softly, before Kankri wakes, so you are not forced by sad but inevitable circumstance to murder any witnesses.

Your good mood will last an unprecedented full night, through picking up Mituna as per your custody agreement with Sollux, through kidnapping Horuss, through an outing to the outdoors with all three tiny gross troll spawn, through the paperwork and husktop work and bureaucratic nonsense and stern talking-tos that are your job while all three get into what trouble they can in your office block. Your good mood will last until you drop off the younger two and witness Sollux’s shitty attempt at lususing.

*

Sollux answers the door when you knock, and you really wish it was Equius, because you don’t have time for a pitch quickie, and his face looks extra smackable tonight.

You surrender Horuss and Mituna and he promptly ignores you to catch Mituna as he charges forward. Mituna’s developed enough muscle tone through swimming after Meenah that he can lift his head easily, but he still tends to charge without looking. Your stick-like kismesis, clearly an attractive target due to the rank odor of unwashed nerd, dodges deftly and attempts to distract him by plunking him down in front of two bowls on the floor. One is water, you hope, and the other some sort of visibly sugary grain puffs.

Mituna buries his head in the bowl and chomps away, despite the fact that you just fed him. In fact, you’ve been feeding him vegetables and fruit all night, and at first you were just hoping to prime him to crap on Sollux’s floor, but he’s peed twice and still hasn’t passed anything else, and clearly this bowl deal is a regular thing. Sollux pulls out a brightly colored box and shakes some more sugary abominations into the first bowl as Mituna switches to the water bowl. You are going to _maim_ Sollux.

You stride forward and grab the box and the bowl and resist the urge to bean him with one or both. You walk away to get out of smacking range and dump them on his desk with the rest of the refuse of the meals he eats at his husktop.

Mituna rolls over and falls asleep curled in almost a ball. He can’t quite hide his face with his tail because his horns are too long. It’s cuter than it ought to be, especially when he physically resembles your kismesis so much. You are determined to iron out what deficiencies you can as he grows so that he isn’t a too-skinny introverted pessimist like his other progenitor. The world can only endure one Sollux. Fortunately, Mituna seems inclined to help, a good eater, overly friendly with strangers, and always _happy_. You honestly don’t know where he gets it. Perhaps the MotherGrub made some substitutions.

Horuss has already shuffled off into the pile of junk and cords in the corner and you can hear tiny grub snores. Kankri is now back to holding onto your pant leg, wavering as he resists sleep. You pat his head to let him know that you’re not going to try to shake him off or leave him behind and you feel a flash of pride mingled with your frustration because grubs and wrigglers need lots of sleep to integrate all the learning they do, and Kankri is trying so hard not to fall asleep, it’s adorable. He gets a tighter grip on your leg and you can feel his limbs locking as he starts that phase of doze-and-jerk-awake that pretty much guarantees he’ll be out within five minutes.

You look back up at Sollux and your fury re-kindles. You try not to yell, but your fury still comes out like the hiss of a brewing device, ready to ascend to a shriek at any moment.

“Sollux! You can’t feed him nothing but sugar puffs, no matter how much he likes them. You’re going to stunt his growth and give him constipation.”

Sollux rolls his eyes and you want to strangle him, but Kankri is still watching, so you cross your arms to resist the urge.

“Have YOU ever stayed up all day because the wriggler can’t crap?! Let me answer that one for you. No. Which means I get the stamp of authority on this issue, as the longsuffering expert.” You’re glad Kankri is so tired because you really hope he’s not following this conversation. You really hope he doesn’t remember what you do, poor grub.

Sollux is still rolling his eyes, and is now also rolling a bit of ball lighting over his claws to rub in how much he’s not paying attention. Does he not get that this isn’t about the two of you, but your spawn? You slow down and hit a slightly deeper pitch, because if you don’t you’re going to scream at him. You lean in toward him, and it really is a shame that you’re so much shorter than him and have to crane your neck.

“ _Let me give you a little incentive. If I have to douse our spawn with something to get things moving, and it **could have been avoided** , but you **didn’t** **because you didn’t listen to me** , **I’m giving the same treatment, by the same orifice, to you**. If you can’t learn when I’m tipping all the answers into your aurals, I’m going to offer you a very kinesthetic lesson_.”

His eyes are wide open and you think he might actually get that this is not a pitch solicitation. There will be no sexy-times, just one very corporeal lesson. The ball lightening pops.

You are thinking of the terrible incident in which Meenah fed Kankri cheese rolls until he vomited, but not before he was stuffed with so many his tiny grub belly was distended with it. Grubs didn’t evolve with such a surfeit of food that they needed to know when to stop eating. They can gorge on meat until they fall into a torpor and sleep it off, hopefully still out of the sun or the reach of any daytime predators, but they’re not evolved to deal with massive quantities of spongey carbohydrates. Raising a grub means that you can only give them limited amounts of certain foods at a time, rationing them to eat slowly enough that they won’t overstuff themselves by accident. Plenty of lusii are good hunters and providers, plenty of the mammals even nurse despite the horrors of grub teeth, but not a one of them is baking bread or fermenting cheese.

The bread absorbed water in Kankri’s stomach and intestines until he was reduced to mewling in pain, too tired to scream anymore. You have never been so frightened in your life and you think that, for once, Meenah actually took you seriously when you told her if she did it again you would kill her.

To her credit, what little you will afford her, you think that she was truly remorseful and hadn’t realized the danger. If you thought that she did it intentionally, you really would have killed her.

Someday Meenah may very well take over the Empire, or half of it if Feferi splits it in some lame brained idea about sharing or efficiency or something. You will be long dead by that time, but Beforus is messed up enough without a ruler that tortures grubs to death for fun, and you refuse to leave such a mess for whatever sorry carcass they get in your place. It would be a betrayal of Feferi, and her ideals, and her faith in you, a betrayal of both leaves of your auspistice. It would be a betrayal of all that was entrusted to you when you took your oaths as a threshecutioner, and later The Threshecutioner. You would be a useless mess after, you have cared for Meenah since she was a sassy adolescent too big for her britches, long before Feferi and her adult-self maneuvered you into mediating, but there are some things that you must hold above all else. There are some things that are sacred.

You are the Chief Threshecutioner and you are harsh but fair with your underlings and you must hold the safety of the nebulous concept of the empire above all else. There are many perceived slights and violations that yet leave the empire unharmed, even if they offend, but there are some things that cannot be allowed.

Sollux continues to look alarmed and is now sort of ineffectually fluttering over Mituna’s curled form. You stride over, hitching your right leg with its parasitic red attachment as you go, and kneel to poke the grub gently a few times. You already know what you’ll find, but you check anyway.

“His breathing, temperature, and pulse are fine, nitwit, and his belly doesn’t feel swollen, just full. Keep him well-watered and don’t feed him anything but warm broth, vegetables, and fruits until he takes a dump. It’s not rocket science, rocketfuel.”

“But he liketh, thugar puffth… I like them two.” Your kismesis is not so much arguing as sadly stating. His confusion is uncomfortable to you, for all that you’ve worked hard in the past to engender it. He’s looking to you for advice and reassurance. Oh little green grubs, is that a pout?! You avert your eyes as you reply.

You don’t bother to tell him you’ve already loaded the grubs up on vegetation and they both _like_ it fine. Equius would approve, but Sollux might think you just ran them up a tree to browse. You don’t think he’s ever eaten anything that didn’t come out of a package or already on a plate. How can anyone so formidable be so helpless? This is your kismesis and you _won’t allow him to make you look bad_.

“I like ‘thugar puffth’,” and you make sure that your sneer comes through clearly, “But I don’t eat them all the time or I wouldn’t have the energy to keep up with all the idiots I manage. I’ll message the kitchens to send something up todusk, you won’t have to do anything, you wreck.”

You’re going to have a word with the kitchens regarding what everyone in this hivesuite has been eating. Who knows what horrors you shall find? You’re going to give the records a thorough inspection and if they don’t fulfill the proper range of protein, vitamins, minerals, and roughage you’re going to put all of them on a new diet and have the kitchens tell them that’s it’s just a new policy.

You’ve watched what you eat for sweeps after the miserable sweeps of your childhood in which a strictly landdweller diet wasn’t quite right for your not-precisely-landdweller carcass. It probably _did_ stunt your growth. It’s lucky that it didn’t stunt your _internal organs_. You’re not letting any of your spawn, or Horuss, suffer for such a stupid reason.

When you became Chief Threshecutioner you gave the Empire’s rationing system for wrigglers and the troops a thorough shakedown and Feferi let you, and even cheered you on when you bulldozed some of the traditionalists. You don’t believe the rationale that hungry soldiers are “more alert” or that wrigglers in state custody need to “properly appreciate” anything the state gives them. Hungry trolls are mean and distracted and stupid. Hungry wrigglers are distracted and vulnerable. They’re both a waste of the Empire’s resources when they could be so much _more_ with just a bit of proactive maintenance. You can’t abide stupidity so deliberate.

You stomp off with your parasitic wriggler attachment. Kankri has already fallen asleep attached to your pants and you have to strip out of them to detach him. You no longer care about the perceived loss of dignity. Cultivating spawn is full of indignity. Indignity, crap, and meltdowns. And that’s just the adults involved.

*

Nepeta does not point you at a Tavros.

Or the Marquise, which would have been a disaster, because Terezi’s got some sort of Not!kismesis/Not!Revenge-Cycle(Yet) crap going on with her hoity-toity-ness and some violet in the aquaculture league, and you have enough on your flat food serving slab without auspisticing your moirail.

Nepeta does not point you at the slyly humorous ambassador on the third level of the palace complex, the one with the delicate treble spiraled horns and thick brows which make her eyes sparkle under their shadows. Cerres’s intricate gold and green wings are widely envied and her personnel policies are not actually stupid. You spent most of the last palace social arguing policy with her and didn’t entirely wish to be elsewhere.

In fact, Nepeta doesn’t point you at anyone, and you reach a new sort of plateau of semi-efficient.

Kankri gets his first palmtop as a reward and incentive for legibly printing his name. He forges ahead in both learning to type and handwriting, but his spelling’s freaking terrible. You persist.

You continue to take all three tiny gross troll spawn regularly. Kankri may have opposable thumbs after his metamrophasis, but he’s still so tiny, you have to lie down on the floor or a reclining plane to be at head level with him. This leaves the two grubs to use you as a recreation installation while you’re occupied. They climb up your waist and up your back or over your rump and down your legs. Mituna likes to park himself between your horns and drool on your hair while spying on the screen. Horuss likes to climb your calves while they’re vertical and waving one around while he rides it makes him laugh.

They both like to play Queen of the Mound on your butt. You find this out early on when you first lie down with all three of them, and Kankri is just beginning to string letters together to read. You’re concentrating very hard on determining what makes sense to him and what he doesn’t understand yet, and since no one’s cried or made any noise at all, you don’t notice the activity on your back until you’re ready to get up. Then you wonder how you tuned out the galumphing of little grub legs all up and down your body, because there’s spittle in your hair and both grubs are asleep on your ass. You try to remove them and someone bites you. You end up standing up, very carefully, and leaning backwards over the reclining plane to remove one grubleg’s grasp at a time. There are wet spots all up and down your back and you really need a shower.

You’d try to discourage it, but they’re fully capable of making you feel lower than a flatworm when they cry. As it is, Horuss will scale your leg and camp out at the small of your back if he can, and Mituna has recently attained the muscular control necessary to do the same. Lying down so that they don’t get hurt when they push each other off is the lesser of the necessary evil of it.

Kankri still likes to be carried, and you indulge him perhaps more than you should. When he was a grub he liked to climb up under your outer shirt and cling to your front so that he looked like a giant parasitic growth bulging out from your chest, necessitating that you spend a great deal of time alone so as to have no witnesses to your apparent deformity. He seems to have outgrown that at least, but he still campaigns for a lift when he can. Mituna likes heights, but Horuss likes something he can crawl into. He’s managed to get into one of your socks, stretching it as he went, and then couldn’t back out. You didn’t laugh (much) and you helped him out (but not before you took pictures). You’re pretty sure that this isn’t what Terezi meant about saving her any good blackmail, but Nepeta likes cute.

You find yourself fascinated with how Kankri views the world, how fast he learns, all the potential you can see. You often foster a few likely prospects as assistants but you’ve never started the training and mentoring and slow cultivation with someone so _young_. You find yourself assiduously documenting the process, both your intentions and his milestones and reactions, saving up what seems to work or not for when Horuss and Mituna follow. You don’t want to overload him with expectations but you can’t bear to be unintentionally crippling him, or any of them, by your own oversight. You practice reading and comprehension and safety rules and you watch him pick up entirely new dialects and ships’ patois when you foster him out among a few of your most trusted assistants, a night or two at a time.

It is absolutely imperative for the continued efficient functioning of the majority of the asses under your purview that they believe that the Chief Threshecutioner never sleep, eat, crap, love, hate, pile, or cry, that at any moment you might pop in for a surprise inspection and confiscate their horn glossys and block their Trollian because you are always watching, _always_.

The few individuals who _do not_ depend on your theoretically impending presence to _do their jobs_ are the few on whom you can depend. You don’t tell them this because if they can’t figure it out themselves, they’re still waiting for final vocational molt. You give raises, promote, and side-advance some that would be happier elsewhere.

Occasionally, you are shocked to find someone that doesn’t take the chance to get away from you as fast as they can. These are the few, the excessively proud, the foolishly brave, the strangely _loyal_ , and you will _shred_ anyone who meddles with your core of competence. Within this shallow pool of talent and curious tenacity within your presence, there are a precious handful with whom you trust your spawn.

Kankri comes back from each visit with his face alight with new possibilities, vocabulary newly furbished, sometimes with inappropriate additions or scandalous gossip, and once with a tiny Irons on a thick soft gray ribbon that no one would admit to giving him. The Irons were authentic iron with a coat of beeswax to avoid rusting in water, and the ribbon was fastened with a break-away clasp midway down each side so no one could strangle him with it. You let him wear it, so long as he keeps it hidden, because he seems to find such joy at having a secret. You also have a very serious word with all your underlings in the wriggler-sitting-brigade over appropriate and inappropriate indoctrination.

After that, he continues to come back with modified versions of Alternian history that are not so much inaccurate as carefully redacted and reinterpreted by a tiny wriggler. You tend to record these for posterity because they are freaking hilarious. Sometimes the way he tells them, it’s the way things _should_ have gone, if trolls were less stupidly wound up in themselves, by turns violent, and fearful, and insecure. It makes something in you ache to think of your cadre of rare competence revising things to be kinder, gentler, the fairytales they wish were true. Some of them are older than you, but they all seem so _young_. Kankri is growing so _fast_.

He’s becoming an entirely new and unique person before your very eyes. It’s nothing less than amazing.

He is so precious to you. You would pull the moons down for him if it would only assure his safety.

You have enough to do nightly without wriggler-sitting more incompetents than you do, but sometimes you wonder what the most obnoxious of them were like as small, impressionable wrigglers. Was there a window when they might have been something better? Was there a turning point when they were not?

You start him on stretches and strength exercises, start taking him for long walks. You carry the grubs and he takes three steps to your every one, but is determined to keep up. In private, you tell him how well he did and you smile, honestly, and he tries even harder. You are so, so proud. And you are afraid, because if anyone knows how devastating a blow it would be, all three would be forfeit to some foolish social climber’s political machinations.

While you hope he has the good taste not to make his own life difficult by being as much of a hardass as you are, while he may never take up the threshecutioner’s traditional weapon, flexibility and stamina and a bit of muscle will be the least of what he needs to back up his smack if he has half your mouth. You don’t know if he’s half Meenah or half Feferi, or somehow a quarter each and half you, or 33.33 percent of each of you, (the cavern jades are closemouthed bunch), but none of his genetic donors are known for shutting up when it would save them some trouble.

You are absolutely positive that he is smarter than 90 percent of the trolls you’ve met, and that’s counting him at his current age against adults. You’re not sure if he’s exceptional or if there’s something in the system that’s making the best of Beforus take stupid pills by puberty. You really must investigate.

*

Equius and Sollux wouldn’t understand personal organization and décor if it was a contagious beast that bit them. There’s a large granite statue of a rampant fucking hoofbeast in their shared quarters. At some point, sweeps past, you couldn't stand to have it watching you while you sexed up Sollux, so you threw a blanket over its head and a jacket over its ginormous bulge.

It had been a particularly triumphant day on your end, and Sollux had been so thoroughly debauched by day’s end that he didn’t remember that he hadn’t done it. You’re pretty sure he wasn’t entirely sure which end was up or where he was. Like you stated, a particularly triumphant day, and you didn’t even take further advantage. Over the following sweeps, the statue has received additional coatings of clothes and junk until it is just another mound in the piles in their block.

The grubs like to climb, and Horuss has staked out the horizontal bulge as his territory. It is simultaneously funny and disturbing and you can’t decide precisely how you feel about it.

*

Sollux starts eating vegetables to set a not-entirely-failing example. You spike your spade’s next order of coffee with hot sauce and get away with it because he buys your line about dissuading the grubs from drinking caffeine. You laugh to yourself and try not to think about how pathetic he is.

You still talk with Terezi whenever the ansible is up, but Nepeta drops in regularly, if not on a regular schedule, and you haven’t exploded in fury for several perigees.

You’ve even set up a rota for preventative auspistice maintenance, seeing both of your ash leaves separately to rationally discuss methods of dealing with one another, how to separate anger about an idea from disrespect for the troll who espouses it, etc.

It still means a lot of sex, and right now your red quadrant is sadly empty while your conciliatory quadrants are both getting and giving a lot more sexual attention than your lone kismesis. Still, between the heavy petting and not bludgeoning your nook with more than one occupant at a time, you’re feeling better than you have any right to feel for a quadrant-smearing genetic sport. The pale quadrant has long since inchwormed its way into a ‘rails with pails scenario and you don’t even care. You just can’t argue with the results.

Nepeta is a delightful deviant and you feel a lot better after a session with her. The two of you argue about work-related issues, historical revisionism, and the wildlife sanctuaries where lusii still roam free with the occasional grub in tow. You even talk about grub and wriggler care, and she tells you a few absolutely priceless stories about Porrim. Terezi is probably salivating, wherever she is, but these are going in your personal mental stash.

Nepeta teaches you more ways to reach orgasm, and more positions, than you thought possible. She’s not just strong, fast, and deadly, she’s _flexible_. She also reminds you that it’s not all about orgasm, for all that your ash leaves seem obsessed with it, theirs and yours, like it’s yet another form of point-keeping in their ongoing tiff.

Still, despite a lot of behavior which you can freely admit was hella kinky, (hello, she’s a handfasted moirail and she’s temp-agencying your pale quad for your long-distance moirail, it’s not like it was ever anything _less_ ,) you still initially balk when she brings up adding a third party.

She manages to convince you. In retrospect, you should never have let her bring it up while she was sitting on your back in her quarters, working on your shoulders. The perpetual tempest that dwells there has mostly taken a leave of absence since she’s started working you over fairly regularly. It’s not like you don’t return the favor, but she says she likes to see you benefit and it’s not like you’ve ever been able to refuse a _backrub_.

So you find yourself agreeing to a threesome with The Mayfly, or rather, her offstage troll counterpart, Aradia, who, before this you had always believed to be a rather charming and practical sort. You are more surprised than betrayed. You are giving up on maintaining messengerbird-boxes for your quadrants, they keep migrating anyhow. The most stable asshole in your clade is Sollux. How messed up is that? Anyhow, Nepeta gets you to agree to a threesome, maybe, and Aradia is there before your devious secondary moirail lets you up off of the hedonistic giant “resting” plane. Spoiler: there is very little rest taking place on the resting plane. Just a whole lot of piling and pailing.

In fact, she’s still parked on your butt when Aradia enters. Her hands are still kneading your shoulders, your vertebrae have each and every one been individually addressed, and she has such perfect timing that she can pop open one of your opercula, flexing the seldom-used, always achy muscles therein, flick you closed again, and leave you moderately stinging but well-stretched, all within the safe space of your exhale. You haven’t had a cough since Terezi started renting out your rump.

The first time Nepeta went spelunking in your respiratory system, you were half asleep on your belly, under the warm heavy weight of her body and hands, trusting and lethargic in a manner entirely unfitting for your vocation.

You hadn’t paid much mind when she started tracing your opercula, scratching away the slight crust of dried internal fluids that rim the edges to keep your internals moist and airtight. In a healthy seadweller, they would get soaked and replaced regularly, like just so much eye grit, wiped away each night. In your sad runty frame, you can never get the pH or temperature or whatever quite right in your shower and they tend to clump into little mounds instead of a thin discreet line, so that when you do manage to scrub them off, the skin underneath is red and inflamed. It is entirely possible that part of the reason that you and your kismesis erratically wobble toward red or pale more often than strictly normal is that your true pitch quad is already occupied by your gills.

The gentle scratching had been nice, like the rare and cherished times Terezi’s run her sharp claws along your scalp. Nepeta may have said something then, you can’t remember. If she did, it’s not unlikely that you replied with an entirely absentminded ‘hmm’ that might have been taken to be an affirmative. Like you already admitted, you were lethargic in a manner entirely unfitting. If you had tried that with someone you couldn’t trust, you’d _deserve_ to be dead.

You had flipped out all over her, even if you were already on your next completely normal inhale by the time you catapulted her off and cleared the resting plane. Just because you _can_ have your opercula open in dry air without collapsing a lung, doesn’t mean it’s _comfortable_. And the longer you wait in between popping them open, the more it stings. You had felt surprisingly betrayed and hadn’t been able to conceal it.

She had apologized then, and when you had calmed down, you had asked her, if not as politely as you might have, what exactly she thought she was doing. And she told you, more politely than she might have, that she was worried about your gills.

Now, you’ve been plenty worried about your gills, when they’re scabby or scaly, or always itchy, that time you got jungle rot, not once, not twice, but thrice consecutively and you been laid out flat on your back for weeks, fevered and certain that you were already sprouting mushrooms, upright only long enough to be periodically walked around in your delirium to try to keep your lungs clear, your vascular and digestive systems cycling instead of shutting down, a dormancy likely to result in your death. This was early in your mandatory basic enlistment and you had been lucky to be stationed with Terezi, who, for the first and likely last time in her life, had papped more than your ass in keeping you alive.

Nepeta sounded more concerned about your _gills’_ continued functionality than about _you_ surviving your _gills_. Your gills will probably continue walking the planet long after you predecease them. After all the antifungals they dumped in you in the jungle, you’re pretty sure your gills are pre-preserved. You might have told her as much. And then, exactly like Terezi would have, she rolled her eyes.

Then, unlike Terezi, she had tossed you over her shoulder (impressive considering you’re both about the same size – Terezi would have just thumped you one) and dumped you in her tub.

Now, you’ve been immersed in a variety of watery solutions of varying salinities, temperatures, and states of unhygienic. There’s a spot along the equator that if it wasn’t passively teeming with giant ravenous barbeled sucker mawfish, you’d vacation there, possibly permanently, and Feferi and Meenah could just relocate themselves to the opposite poles, or, you know, sort their own shit like functioning adults. But it wasn’t until Nepeta physically dumped you in that you realized that anyone made bathing tubs large enough to swim a few strokes and immerse your head easily. And it’s heated. The first few minutes stung, but in a good way. After that it just felt nice. Very, very nice. You might have dreamed about waterproofing your husktop so you never had to leave.

You had felt better after that and Nepeta may possibly have subsequently bribed you into parting with a few of your best people as expert consultants for some of her missions by mere virtue of waiting to ask until you were immersed and under her hands. Your new favorite position is anything in that tub with Nepeta.

Yes, anything. Because after that initial hey-let’s-explore-your-innards-without-being-absolutely-sure-everyone’s-on-board, she’s always careful to ask and, she has to know this by now, you tend to agree to anything when you feel warm and safe and all your respiratory organs are in rare agreement.

Under her, check. Over her, check. In her, check. On her, check. In her and on her, check. Intertwined with her, check. Entirely immersed and exploring her, check. Entirely immersed and just sleeping on her, guilty. And she hasn’t licked you once. Though you might have done a bit of it yourself, and she’s nibbled or kissed _just about everywhere_. You’ve never felt so cherished. You don’t feel in the least like a scorecard.

You wonder, quite frankly, if you are pretty much already in each other’s red quad, as pale as some of her substitute-moirail duties are. You’ve lost track of how many buckets you’ve filled. She always asks you before disposing of them and you appreciate that she’s not about to stick you with a third wriggler, or fourth, you kind of count Horuss as one of yours. You appreciate it in that you like this… relationship, whatever it is, and it would be a shame to have to murder her for making assumptions. You’d probably die trying actually, and then what would happen to Kankri and Mituna? Meenah would probably confiscate them both and bling them out until they sank under their own weight. They’d have to trundle along the bottom floors of the castle like overloaded hermit crabs until someone rescued them. Horuss would grow up to be an introverted vocationalist, living and dying without ever once setting foot into moonlight again.

You can’t regret any your spawn, not now, but you’ve learned that offspring-rearing is not for those with weak vascular systems or delicate constitutions. Grubs are equal parts adorable and disgusting and have clearly evolved that way because no lusus ever would put up with the latter without copious amounts of the former to at least partially offset it. There are nights, and days, when you wish that the middle set of legs didn’t drop off during metamorphosis, because you could really use a second set of hands.

So, the day that Nepeta convinces you to consider a threesome, she’s already done you once in the tub, slow and gentle and thorough, until you were dozing on the edge as she rocked into you and ran claws up your belly, thumbs over your opercula, gentle fingertips over the feathering of your active and un-aching gills, strong thumbs into the meat of your shoulders and neck.

The heat and humidity outside the tub are cranked up and she helps you dry off, runs her palms down your sides like she’s soothing a riding beast. You feel like that riding beast, mute, tired but cared for, biddable.

You end up on her wide reclining plane, face down with her sitting on your butt, her strong hands on your back again. You like the feel of her strong thighs bracketing you, like you’re tied down to the ground, you won’t just float away in some rogue current. You’re mostly awake and you agree that you’ve enjoyed most of her ideas and that you might not be adverse to another. What feels like seconds later, the two of you are no longer alone.

Aradia’s stage presence is not exactly a lie. It might be enhanced, but when she walks into a block, heads do turn, and it is only in part the active field of a psionic. The rest is just Aradia. You can attest to this because you know the second the door between the sleeping and entertaining sections of Nepeta’s suite opens, not because of a noise or an air current, but because of Aradia’s sheer presence. Her presence is followed shortly by the tiny tingle of her polite psionic field and a soft scent, like non-carnivorous night-blooming flowers and burnt sugar, intensifying as she flicks her wings. She’s barefoot and her skirt is long enough that it’s hard to tell if she’s walking or floating.

The door shuts and locks again and you’re trying to sit up. Nepeta’s hand is on your shoulder, not like she’s pinning you, though she totally is, she hasn’t gotten off your rump at all, but like she’s trying to remind you that she’s here to calm your stormy temper.

Aradia bids you both a good night, her voice deep and dark and beautiful, the harmonics making it clear why she’s a siren of the stage with a cult following. You don’t listen to a lot of music, but she’s inclade, what with papping Sollux’s unpadded ass since they’ve been out of metamorphosis, and you respect her, so you have all her works, one way or another.

They kiss, tongues and teeth and the graceful misalign of noses, each with a hand at the back of the other’s skull. Aradia’s hair is long, past her waist in wild curls. Nepeta winds her fingers in it and fists a great mass of it. You sigh, because they really are beautiful, and this is clearly well practiced, and no one has ever mentioned this so clearly you are being entrusted with a great deal that they’re letting you witness it.

Aradia has a legion of fans and a paparazzi following. Nepeta is Head of Special Tasks, one of the most secretive, and certainly the most deadly, of the Empire’s departments, and has no few enemies, personal and otherwise. The time she’s been spending with you has probably accounted for a great deal of her off duty time, if she’s ever really off duty. You wonder how long they’ve been matesprits, or if you just aren’t the only orbiting body in Nepeta’s stable. You find yourself less interested in knowing for your own sake as for theirs. You always were a sucker for a good romance.

Aradia’s other hand is on the plane by your head, and as they disengage, Nepeta lets her hair run through her fingers until she’s only holding the very tips. Aradia looks down and smiles at you.

“May I?”

You blink, still shamefully slow after Nepeta’s attentions and their little show.

Aradia waves two fingers at you, a slow little wave, and manages to make it look cheerful, and not like she’s trying to communicate with someone over an ansible delay or head wound.

“I’ve always thought your horns were cute. May I touch them?”

You are not immune to the much fabled Megido charm. Also, post-Nepeta Karkat is 75% less uptight and at least 50% more kinky. You smile back, “Only if I can touch yours.” When she pets your horns and hornbeds with fingers and a tickle of psionics, you’re 100% sure you got the better end of this deal because it feels nice and she’s got an _amazing_ rack.

Nepeta lets go of Aradia’s hair and moves back. You climb to your knees as Aradia climbs onto the reclining plane and transfers the hand that was on Nepeta to join the one still on your skull. Your own still slow grasping appendages reach up to her and trace the impressive whirl of her horns, knotted with ridges and rich with a striped rainbow of browns, yellows, and burgundies within the three bands of color. They really are magnificent, polished to a satin finish but otherwise unmodified, cresting high up enough to protect her head and curving back in before their own shape makes them excessively cumbersome or a liability. They are the epitome of troll beauty, functional and formidable. Her eyes are gentle and her smile challenging.

Aradia leans in and lays a soft kiss on side of your mouth. You freeze. You’re suddenly jerked back into trying to figure out if this is pale or flush, something that you’ve been able to mostly let go with Nepeta. Aradia leans back and raises an eyebrow while you sort yourself. You lean back to kiss her on the mouth. Now your tongues and teeth and minds are back in agreement. She tastes like she smells, heady but mostly harmless flowers and nectar, rich and sustaining, backed by the latent storm crackle of leashed psionics. Sollux never smells like this, uncouth barbarian.

Nepeta’s arms are resting on your hips and you don’t know when she put them there.

When Aradia and you pull back to breath more fully, to look at one another, the first lick of Nepeta’s partially unsheathed bulge greets the curve of your ass. She leans in and rests her head on your shoulder and it gives you a good swipe.

“Karkitten may be willing for a bit more company, but he’s not entirely sure. Give him a good argument, my formidable purrity?”

And, to her audience of two, Aradia steps back off the plane, and unbuttons her shirt, letting it slide down her arms and drop to the floor. Her skirt drops next and she’s standing there in nothing but her interlocked holsters, one for her rumblespheres, and one over each hip, further locked into place by straps up to her top holster in the front, and, you can see as she turns a bit to wink at you over her shoulder, crossing in the back. The oiled coils of her whips are now clearly visible as exactly what they are instead of just the slight bump of their handles through her demure skirt pockets. She quirks a smile at you, lifts a brow, and it’s a challenge.

Part of The Mayfly’s mystique is that she is never less than perfectly dressed for her performances and public appearances. She wears high collared tops that cover her, neck to waist to wrist, full skirts and leggings and steel toed and heeled boots. Sometimes there are public vapors and gossip columns when she shows a flash of forearm, the smallest glimpse of bare neck. The usually dark colors make her burgundy and carmine and gold wings flame with color. There are odes written to their patterns, and not just by fans but by actual slam poets that live off their mouth runnings.

So you absolutely know, emphatically, that it is _not_ public knowledge that Aradia has a series of six tiny gold jeweled barbells running along the center line of her perfect just-slightly-convex belly to just above her sheath, like she ornamented a path. Some seadwellers have lines of photophores there, and it’s colloquially known as a treasure trail. Meenah claims it’s a mark of beauty, but Meenah is a smug braggart and was flexing her abs at you at the time.

The highest two barbells are set with red and blue, alternated, and you absolutely know that these represent Sollux. He’s got tiny symmetrical studded rings in her color, one in each ear, high up along the outer edge where he mostly forgets them until you bite and tug. There’s a set that’s Nepeta’s green and another three that are set in Aradia’s own rich burgundy. You think about all the trolls obsessed with The Mayfly, her physically concealed stage presence, the mystery of her smile, and the secret of it makes you warm. You’ve never thought of your kismesis’s moirail like this, but she asked you to, so it’s not like you’re the only pervy inclade fancier here.

You are super smug that while Nepeta promised Terezi that there would be no licking, you never promised anything but to say no if you needed an out.

There’s a double flick of latches and Aradia sets both her whips down on a shelf, still coiled, then unhooks her rumblesphere holster at the jeweled clasp in the middle. She drops the holsters to the ground and joins the two of you on the reclining plane.

*

You had thought that you were relatively familiar with most of Nepeta’s adventuresome additions to the basic concept of sex and/or violations of the delineations of quadrants. There was the papping and massage, which both firmly straddled and fucked the division between red and pale.

There are times when she just lets you rest under her, belly down and back blanketed by her heavy comforting weight. You’d both been naked, but every time you’ve fallen asleep before you even got to sex, if sex was even her goal, so that was more firmly on the line of your baseline deviant polypale than quadrant muddling. Her weight had initially set a heat inside you in the pit of your gastric bladder. You had pushed up against her a few times and she didn’t prevent you from rising, but she didn’t get off of you, just mouthed your neck a few times, teeth firm but not painful, stroked down your belly and sides until you settled. You’ve tried it the other way, face up or on top, but it doesn’t seem to have the same effect for her or for you, as nice as it is.

Mostly you concentrate on breathing in time with her until you fall asleep. Sometimes she grooms your horns, the steady rasp of the files and abrasives grating on your ears, but your bloodpusher swollen with the care she takes, leaving the perfect thickness for optimal reception and minimal excessive sensitivity. Terezi did this once for you, only once, and you still treasure the memory, her deft hands and fierce smile banked to a concentrating frown. She didn’t let you return the favor, something you found enjoyable, cherished, would have been an exquisite pain to her. The two of you recognize your differences and they are one of your strengths as moirails, even as it involves certain compromises. It is how, once you got used to the idea, your odd relationship with Nepeta is also a sign of the devotion between Terezi and you.

The fire seems content to be banked under Nepeta’s weight, warm without needing to be addressed, and when you wake up, she’s always playing with your hair or horns, but still on top of you. It’s always hours later and you can’t imagine she isn’t bored, but she doesn’t budge until you’re ready. It is emphatically something that Terezi would not only never offer to do, but may very well be incapable of doing for you. Terezi weighs less than you, that’s part of it, but the minor part. The bigger part is that she would never have been able to stay still so long without a distraction. Maybe if she had her husktop…

You’ve gone along with it when Nepeta introduced you to ice, hot wax dripped off of primitive candles, combinations of the two. She’s careful of your gills and you’ve always felt unthreatened, free to concentrate on determining if you like what’s happening. She’s slipped a bit of ice up your nook and slid in after and that made you buck and cling and curse, but you’ve also never refused a repeat, or the reverse of the scenario, or the simultaneous execution of both.

You had let her bind your arms behind your back in the long maximum security cuffs that lock a troll’s arms together from wrist to elbow. You had tried to settle into it and couldn’t, had pressed against her side as you tried to count your breaths and couldn’t prevent them from accelerating. You hadn’t had to ask her to take them off, she did it long before you would have admitted defeat, and this is just one of the now myriad of reasons that you trust her wholly, without reserve, in the same way you trust Terezi to rummage through your psyche and never intentionally harm you, in the same way you trust Feferi to be an irrepressibly optimistic but ultimately iron-spined queen, and Sollux to be an introverted soft-bellied jerk who nonetheless would defend you to his own death should anyone seriously try to harm you.

In that moment, while you were shuddering quietly against Nepeta, silent but for the hitch of your breath, she had run her hands over you, temple to neck to back, shoulder to arm to hand, tracing the aches where you had strained yourself. She had held your vulnerability and let you recover without forcing you to speak and she had won you. After that, you don’t refuse her anything, because you trust her to know your limits better than you will admit. And she does.

She’s set fish hooks into the skin of your back, one and another and another, until there are two ladders of them, one for each gill, two thumb-lengths away from where each begins. She’s gently tugged the resultant mass of lines like a driver braking a team of eight ceremonial hoofbeasts, and you knew that you could break free if you needed, the damage limited to skin, but you didn’t need to break away, you could collect yourself and rest within the pull of her hands.

She’s teased your bulge out then clamped it so that you couldn’t come or retract, and she worked your nook until you begged her to release you, and she did.

She’s worked your nook loose until she could slip a fabricated egg up it, then slowly dialed it up so it vibrated or sent out little shocks. And she’s kissed and petted you while you tried to get used to it, distracting you from sinking your teeth into your lip to try to ignore it instead.

She’s even slipped a thin super-flexible disposable wormrod _up_ your bulge, along the main slurry channel, and talked you through, one hand firm against your belly, kept you breathing deep and even as she kept the steady meter of it for you to follow, until you didn’t just endure but enjoyed it. By comparison, you weren’t even surprised when she slid herself up your wastechute and you ended up enjoying it.

You’ve let her knot you twice now, both in the tub, once from behind, and once intertwined simultaneously, _and_ she’s stayed to help you express the slurry. At this point, Nepeta is the most solicitous asshole in your clade and totally your favorite.

She’s repeated almost everything with you blindfolded, or with the thin discombobulation bands over your horns, or both at once, until all that was left was her next touch, the safety of it, and you had cried, more than once, and felt as if a great space had been hollowed out within you, a sanctuary even you didn’t know existed, a place to retreat, a place to root and stand solid, after.

She’s wormed you and it was initially alright, the nookworm modestly less than half the size of one of your ash leave’s bulges, but when the full impact of the worm slime hit, you weren’t sure which up was down and you _didn’t like it at all_. You’re positive she didn’t come that day, though the slime made sure you did. She held you as you recovered and you read the tag yourself the next night. Evidently wormslime is one of the ways in which your mutant carcass stacked the deck against you, because it was only supposed to induce mild euphoria and encourage pailing, not full out tripping shameglobes. Still, you’re relieved to know because that’s one less thing waiting to ambush you.

*

So you think you’re prepared when Aradia joins you, kneeling on the plane. Nepeta crosses the room to the six drawer locked dresser where you know the hooks and lines and egg sit, where she had pulled the virgin nookworm from its sealed stasis. She opens a different drawer from “yours” and pulls out a coil of not quite burgundy cord. In fact, one could call it crimson. Or candy-red. Aradia winks at you and crosses her arms behind her head. The little barbells wink at you too.

You watch Nepeta as she entwines Aradia in the cording, until she has enshrined her in the short lines and the twisted gathers of not-quite-knots in your color. It takes a while and finally she sits back to ask you what you think. You don’t know what to say.

Aradia is resplendent, physically immobilized, but easy in it, cocooned in the wrappings like a jewel in its setting. Nepeta’s bound her legs, ankle to thigh, spread so that there’s no doubt that her bulge and nook are as interested as her eyes and smile, spread and framed so that she can’t conceal them if she wanted to, not without psionically cutting the cord. There’s a repeating pattern of diamonds down her middle, from between her rumblespheres to just above her bulge, the last pervy, perfect diamond perfectly framing the trail of gems. Her sides are open and the only cord behind her back is where it crosses her shoulders behind her neck to lace more patterns across her forearms and join her hands together. Her bulge is already twisting and when it reaches a cord, it tries to coil under, only to twist away again.

The cord dimples her arms and belly and thighs, not deeply, but enough to show the pressure, to seem to invite your hands to explore the tension and contrast, cord to skin. She’s very beautiful, and also very brave, because you know that you could not be that calm.

Then Nepeta crosses back to the drawer and pulls out something else. She holds up a psionic-suppression caller, gleaming in a very-much-not-standard brushed gold finish. Aradia nods and lifts her chin, regal. Nepeta activates and fastens it, and Aradia smiles. You are more than a little bit in awe.

Next comes both a bulge clamp and a nookworm, and as Aradia accepts both, and while you briefly wondered if the six drawers meant there were four more assholes in Nepeta’s deviant orbit, now you’re just wondering if it’s your drawer and Aradia’s five. The nookworm is already active, no newly-awoken-from-stasis fingerling here, and a part of you wonders what it does when it’s not on the clock. Are five drawers of the dresser a nookworm apartment? Does it have its own movie screen and food storage and tiny bathing apparatus and loadgaper in there? Does it have a vanity coon shaped like a nook? You shake yourself out of your fugue.

What follows is a great deal of three-way kissing and petting, and you strive to make Aradia do that little arch and flutter that sends the flower scent of her wings back at you. You’re not sure if their red is also a bit pitch because they seem to be daring one another to take it further. Aradia bites Nepeta’s lower lip until her fangs meet and you stop to watch them kiss like they’re fighting. You stroke the contrast of the cord over her thigh, smooth skin, dimpled with silken cord, smooth skin again. You scratch your nails along the cord and slid your fingers under, tug lightly. She groans and arches and they break apart and Nepeta looks at you, but Aradia is looking at Nepeta, waiting for her to look back so she can raise a brow.

“How far are you willing to share?”

“What are you willing to purroffer?”

“What do I have that you want and don’t already have?”

“True.” And she crooks a finger under the cord closest to Aradia’s bulge.

“But it’s not really a question of what you’re willing to give. The question is how far Karkat’s willing to share himself.” And she turns her head to you.

“Will you join me?”

“How… how do you want me?”

“Mmm, on my bulge if you please, there’s not quite enough room the other way around.”

You’re not quite sure what that was about, but the invitation seems genuine, so you straddle her with your hands on her shoulders and feel Nepeta behind you, so close she’s bracketing you in her arms, and as weird as this is, with everything she’s already done to you, you think it’s less weird than if you and Aradia were just spontaneously fucking inclade.

Aradia asks you if you’re going to join the show, and you think, why the fuck not, so you arch back yourself, angled so that she can see the jut of your butt behind you, and you dip up and down just a bit to show her that you’ve fully displayed yourself to the architect of all of this.

“I think I see why you wanted a bit of knot-work today, Lioness, but you really couldn’t hide that butt.”

“I didn’t have to, beclawse you still can’t reach it. Maybe if you say, purrity, purrity purrlease.”

You feel Nepeta parting your nook and getting a few strokes in before she pushes you forward and guides Aradia’s questing bulge into you. You sink slowly down and the sensation, combined with the indents of cord against your own skin, is intense. You stare at Aradia and watch the expressions on her face change as her bulge works you and the worm works her. You clench and she tips her head back.

It’s nice for a while, and you can feel Aradia start to thrum as the wormslime really hits. You can hear a bit of an echo in your own chest and you don’t bother to suppress it.

You’ve already come with Nepeta earlier and while your bits are all interested, climax seems far off, but Aradia seems increasingly closer, the powerful clench of her abs rocking you increasingly strongly, until you think it must be painful for her not to have come yet. At that point, Nepeta pulls you back, and the both of you hiss at her. She pushes Aradia back until she’s on her back, legs sill bound so that her feet are flat and her knees now upright. The curve and coil of her bulge is frantic and brilliant.

Nepeta turns you and you get what she wants, straddle Aradia’s hips again, torn between watching the frantic brilliant coiling of her bulge and getting it back inside of you.

“There you go, all the butt you can stare at, ‘Radia.”

And Nepeta dips her fingers back into you and shoves them up Aradia’s nook just as you sink back down.

You don’t know why she did it until you see the nookworm poke its head back out, following Nepeta’s fingers, and she draws your bulge down toward it. You freeze for a moment, and she kisses you, on the cheek.

“This one is loads less strong, and you won’t get much of a dose, promise.”

And it’s ‘promise’ that does you, because she could have said “purromise” but she’s really not playing.

The worm latches on to the tip of your bulge and suckles, and you are taken by surprise when orgasm sweeps through you not long after. The worm swallows it all down and you can’t believe it fits and you know that the bulk of its body, and now your slurry, are still inhabiting Aradia’s nook. Nepeta reaches under you and pulls Aradia’s bulge out of you. You twist just enough to see as she unlatches the clamp and strokes once, and Aradia’s orgasm sweeps over her in waves of muscular contractions, as unstoppably as a cavalreaper charge. There’s a warm wave of slurry all over your butt and back, and it’s already rapidly cooling, but the damn worm is still suckling you and you don’t care. You pull your bulge away and collapse to the side.

Nepeta’s cut the line to free Aradia’s arms and legs quickly, and they’ve both got a hand between her legs, tracing the lips of her nook and the head of the nookworm, visibly distended but still buried inside her. You roll yourself up in a temperature regulation plane with uncaring abandon as to the mess you’re smearing about and watch. It takes a while, but Nepeta manages to wring another orgasm from Aradia, and convinces the nookworm to waddle back out. She wraps it in a smaller temperature regulation plane and hands it to you. It purrs and sinks back into the makeshift cocoon. The vibration is steady and somehow nice, but you have moments as time skips forward when you realize how surreal this all feels and then time skips forward again and you’re just experiencing it. Aradia manages to roll over, folding her wings into their most concise form, and snuggles into you, snagging the upper plane as she goes. Nepeta grabs another and brackets her other side, and now you’re physically in a pile with the both of them. You’re not sure what the weirdest part about this is. The nookworm is still purring. It’s not a grub, it’s a sex toy and maybe a pet, but you can’t help but cradle it to your chest, you’ve just been programmed to at this point. You really must investigate how tiny things seem to rewire your brain. It could be a liability.

Nepeta combs her fingers through Aradia’s hair, then yours, and returns to rest her hand in the thick mass of her curls. Aradia smiles at you, her pupils blown wide with wormslime. She pets your horns and trails a hand lower, past the bundled nookworm, down your belly to pet the trail to your sheath. She leans in and nibbles your ear, “I look good in your color, but you look beautiful in mine.” She swipes up a bit of her slurry from your back, smiles at you, and dabs a dot onto the upper arch of your ear. She hums a bit and you find yourself nodding in time. “Also, I want to do that again, but with more touching.” Now it’s your turn for your eyes to go wide.

She trails her hand back down and scritches the nookworm behind its eyes until it twitches with joy or possibly the need to pee, and its purr goes double-time. You fall asleep like that, in a pile of helpful inclade deviants, with your sickles on the shelf behind you, and the certainty that you’d be miraculously fresh-as-a-fucking-daisy by nightfall. It’s perverted, but it’s a system, and it works. You may have agreed to let Aradia pierce your ears.

*

The nookworm snores all day.


End file.
